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In the past few years we've seen a lot of hardware-based innovation (or at the very least expansion). New products and markets have arisen built around hardware and its use. Smartphones, tablets, netbooks and gaming systems are all examples of markets that have expanded and some if not most of the products make use of free software. This is great but why does it seem to be that the free-software products are second-generation, playing catch up. Where is the device innovation driven by free software?

Free Software is mainly about innovation. Free Software engineers find radical new ways of solving old problems. In doing so, they teach those whose minds have ossified how to think outside of the box. The U.S. manufacturing sector is in trouble, partially because we have been outperformed by our neighbors in the East.

"On Friday 2nd November I attended the London FSFE event, Free Software as a Social Innovation. I am not really a techie (though I have been Free since 1998) and certainly not in an NGO, but had asked to go because I wanted to see some ground level advocacy in action.

What does Free Software have to do with ending poverty? More than you probably think. It is not just at the core of consumer products like the Android loaded G1 phone from HTC, or the One Laptop Per Child XO.

Many people have complained about the lack of pre-integrated computers running GNU/Linux or the lack of fully free software drivers for important hardware. Ultimately though, it’s up to you, the consumer, both to satisfy your own requirements and to send a message to vendors that supporting free software pays. You can do this fairly easily by integrating your own computer from its major components, and selecting only components that have free software drivers. It’s certainly possible, and even if you’ve never built a computer before, it’s not all that hard!

So far, I’ve identified examples of free, commons-based production of just about every category of pure information product which exists. And that leads to the next question: what about the material marketplace? Can community methods be used to design, prototype, and manufacture physical products?

Playing around with radio-frequency transmission and reception used to be restricted to those of us with hardware skills. That has been changing for some years, though, as processors get faster and software techniques advance; now, many radio transmitters and receivers are built with simple (but flexible) hardware.

There has been this argument in the community for a while that using some non-free software to further the Free Software advocacy might be a useful thing. As an example say you have a graphics card that there is no Free Software driver for. Then using a proprietary driver and therefore being able to use a mostly free software OS becomes justifiable.